500 trillion watt laser, How much MDC?

[Blight]

I was making a weapon system for the top of Chi Town, a 500 trillion watt laser, sort of it's own death ray. Cheesy i know but hey I'm a geek. Now before the screams of munchkin start, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have a laser that goes on line this year with this out put. Heck the Texas Petawatt laser reached greater than one petawatt of laser power on Monday morning, March 31. (A petawatt is one quadrillion watts)
I was going to make it a big Emplacement weapon with a effective range of about 10 miles. (Right at the range of our land based anti missile lasers.) I might increase that.
I was just wondering what i should place the damage at. I mean by the time of the rifts this might not even be close to the most powerful laser in use. Or it could be tremendously over powered.
Just wanted to get some input.
Thanks Blight.

[glitterboy2098]

a few comments.

1) the lasers being put online currently use a bit of a loophole to get that power. they only last a billionth of a second. a watt is 1 joule per second. so the "petawatt" rating is only if the beam lasted a full second. otherwise we'd never be able to power the darn things. it's actually several megajoules in that one pulse tohugh, which is what they needed for the research.

2.) 1 MD is ~10 kilojoules, by my calculations. if we assume your "supergun" fires a full 1 second pulse (which is really overkill), that would put it at something like a maximum of 50,000,000,000 MD.

3.) with the amount of energy involved, this thing has a huge blast radius. like "fire at the horizon and your run the risk of blowing yourself up". which means it has a minimum range. big problem? lasers are line of sight. so you can't fire over the horizon. with the energy involved, your range would be pretty good though. reach out and write your name in 40+ mile craters on the moon, for instance.

.) efficency. lasers are not 100% efficent. nothing is. so for the power put into the beam, a large amount will be wasted over that. currently lasers run under 20% efficent. rifts lasers have to be over 90% efficent to work as described. but your still looking at a lot of wasted power.

4.) recharge rate. 5x10^15 th joules is a lot of power. in 2007, newyork city used 62,591 gigawatt hours. your laser would need nearly 2 million times that to fire for just one second. so unless your willing to steal the new york city power grid, and recharge for 2 million years between shots, you need a powerplant able to supply a lot more power.

global power use in 2005 was about 500 exawatts, or 5x10^20 watts. so basically you need a sizeable portion of the entire power output of our planet to power a 500 trillion watt laser for a single second pulse. and you'd only get one shot per year...

[Library Ogre]

With all respect to glitterboy, he's forgetting rule 1 of Rifts: Is it AWESOME? (Rule 0 is still "You are the GMs ***** so long as you consent to play in his game"). A 500 trillion watt laser is Awesome, so it exists.

My suggestion? 1D6*1000 damage, twenty mile range, and requires two minutes between shots to recharge... maybe with a catastrophic failure table for when you roll a 1 or 2.

Or, you require it to use frozen nitrogen as a power source, which has to be loaded between shots. It would be like lasing a stick of dynamite.

[slade the sniper]

a few comments.

And for the reasons already given by glitterboy2098, the light of reason kills the idea of the mythical chi-town god-laser, which somehow would do far more damage to a far greater range than the huge 'main gun' lasers on the huge, 4,000 foot long CCW battleships in the phase world setting, which is far more technologically advanced than the Coalition. By the way, those super-weapons, the most powerful technological weapons in all the megaverse as far as I know, deal 2d6x1,000 to a range of 30 miles in atmosphere.

Um, at the risk of being a complete Robotech tool...Heavy Particle Beams (mounted on Zentraedi ships), the main proton accelerator cannons on the Robotech Factories, the Reflex Cannons on the SDF-1/2/3 all do 2d6 x 1,000,000 MDC and the Electro Magnetic Fission Beam on the Master's ships do 4d6 x 1,000,000 MDC.

If you wanted to make a bigger gun, go for it!

-STS

[Qev]

Assuming this Beam of Awesome actually fires 500 terajoule blasts, it ought to be doing pretty much the same thing as the CS 'Firefly' nuclear torpedo, so roughly 2d4x100 MD to a 1000 ft radius around the target, and 5d6x10 to everything within 3 miles of the target.

[slade the sniper]

Ugh. Those are "destroys everything ultimate I Win" buttons. They are unique to Robotech and do NOT exist in Rifts. Massive space battleships in Phase World only do 2d6x1000 with their biggest guns. Phase world is rifts, robotech is not.

Do what? They don't? Are you sure? Maybe you mean to say, they don't exist in your game...I seem to remember this "Conversion Book" that said RIFTS and ROBOTECH were parallel dimensions (page 34), and I thought that the Megaverse spanned ALL Palladium settings...

-STS

[Jesterzzn]

Ugh. Those are "destroys everything ultimate I Win" buttons. They are unique to Robotech and do NOT exist in Rifts. Massive space battleships in Phase World only do 2d6x1000 with their biggest guns. Phase world is rifts, robotech is not.

Do what? They don't? Are you sure? Maybe you mean to say, they don't exist in your game...I seem to remember this "Conversion Book" that said RIFTS and ROBOTECH were parallel dimensions (page 34), and I thought that the Megaverse spanned ALL Palladium settings...

-STS

The megaverse does, but Chi-Town is pretty much rooted in Rifts. As for conversions, sure, if you want the CS to have Masters level tech and Protoculture powered "I Win" weapons, go for it, but Kaltes is still correct that it is at best out of place with the rest of the setting.

[Qev]

If the laser was 500 trillion watts and it fired for 1 second, that would be 500 trillion joules, which is roughly equal to the total energy release of a 120 kiloton nuclear weapon, except concentrated to a ridiculous degree in the form of a laser beam.

Well, a direct hit by a 100kt nuclear device in Rifts does 2d4x100 MD to the target, and that's 100kt concentrated into a single point, too.

Because it is a laser beam, I do not see why it would have a big explosion radius. Lasers don't do that. It would simply burn a clean hole through anything and everything it came into contact with, for a very, very long distance.

More-or-less, the target will absorb the beam energy, and then what's left of the target will re-radiate it omnidirectionally (while itself expanding as a shockwave of plasma), effectively turning the beam into an explosion at the point of impact.

Of course, Rifts doesn't exactly have rules for that sort of thing, so really it ought to just do 2d4x100 MD to the target with no blast effects (and you get to ignore the truly insane recoil).

[Lenwen]

If the laser was 500 trillion watts and it fired for 1 second, that would be 500 trillion joules, which is roughly equal to the total energy release of a 120 kiloton nuclear weapon, except concentrated to a ridiculous degree in the form of a laser beam.

And that which was posted up above clearly shows that even laser beams lose ALOTTA thier power overall ..

So a 500 Trillion watt laser would not be a 100% 500 Trillion watt Laser when its fired ...

But it would be so redonkulasly close that it honestly prolly wont matter haha .

[TechnoGothic]

I was making a weapon system for the top of Chi Town, a 500 trillion watt laser, sort of it's own death ray. Cheesy i know but hey I'm a geek. Now before the screams of munchkin start, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have a laser that goes on line this year with this out put. Heck the Texas Petawatt laser reached greater than one petawatt of laser power on Monday morning, March 31. (A petawatt is one quadrillion watts)
I was going to make it a big Emplacement weapon with a effective range of about 10 miles. (Right at the range of our land based anti missile lasers.) I might increase that.
I was just wondering what i should place the damage at. I mean by the time of the rifts this might not even be close to the most powerful laser in use. Or it could be tremendously over powered.
Just wanted to get some input.
Thanks Blight.

Megawatt Lasers do MEGA-DAMAGE
Gigawatt Lasers do GIGA-Damage

See Rifter 9 1/2 for Giga-damages and weapons.

[Blight]

OK i think this topic petered out pretty fast. For you guy that don't know i start threads like this to get people thinking about the system we play and it's mechanics. My first was years ago, but so far my best (I think) has been "falling borgs", and "A tank for all seasons". Tho some of the nuke discussions have been fun.
I was going to go into how theoretical i could use A.D. (Advanced Decay) technology to build up the kind of power that this laser needed for a moment giving you that one second shot. Then i would use that to go into possible explanations into rifts power generation technologies. Have i got some fun / controversial ideas for that one. But life has intruded and I'm up for 70hr work weeks for some time. So if anyone want to take up the cause and get people thinking and fleshing out more on this and other subjects please take up the torch.
Thanks Blight.

[taalismn]

I think the idea of a 'lighthouse of death' laser battery like the one discussed here could make for a secent 'Guns of Navaronne'-like adventure...Not necessarily for attacking Chi-Town or LOne Star, but for the CS isolating areas like Kingsdale for attack, but cutting off air travel in a region...

[glitterboy2098]

With all respect to glitterboy, he's forgetting rule 1 of Rifts: Is it AWESOME? (Rule 0 is still "You are the GMs ***** so long as you consent to play in his game"). A 500 trillion watt laser is Awesome, so it exists.

My suggestion? 1D6*1000 damage, twenty mile range, and requires two minutes between shots to recharge... maybe with a catastrophic failure table for when you roll a 1 or 2.

Or, you require it to use frozen nitrogen as a power source, which has to be loaded between shots. It would be like lasing a stick of dynamite.

actually, i haven't. i just like to lace my awsome with a trace of beleivability.

in this case, Chi-town (or one of the other fortress cities, like maybe that new one their building) having some really powerful laser for defense is an awsome idea. but 500 trillion watts is a bit overkill. using one of the big anti-ship lasers from phaseworld for stats might be a better idea. a few dee six times a few hundred damage, out ot a few hundred miles. more than sufficent. those are only like 1.3 x 10^10 joule lasers. kilotons per second yeild, to use a term from the Bolo universe. able to shoot down a DHT or equivilent in on hit.

plus, they could be beleivably powered by the power generation methods the CS has available, and would have a decent recharge time (IIC, 1 shot a melee). their also within the CS's technical capabilities (although a CS built one would be bulkier and heavier, i'd think)

[Daniel Stoker]

<snip>

Or, you require it to use frozen nitrogen as a power source, which has to be loaded between shots. It would be like lasing a stick of dynamite.

Came for a Real Genius quote, leaving fulfilled

It would have been better if he had remembered it was actually excited bromide in an argon matrix, making it an excimer frozen in it's excited state.


Daniel Stoker

[Library Ogre]

<snip>

Or, you require it to use frozen nitrogen as a power source, which has to be loaded between shots. It would be like lasing a stick of dynamite.

Came for a Real Genius quote, leaving fulfilled

It would have been better if he had remembered it was actually excited bromide in an argon matrix, making it an excimer frozen in it's excited state.

Remember bromide and argon matrix, but I couldn't remember the full quote.

[taalismn]

1600mm Autocannon anyone? AKA the car launcher.

AUTOCANNON?! I'd call that a Massdriver....
You'd need magnetic levitation to 'port that thing around in one piece, or carry it in pieces and assemble it on site...like the 'Little David' super-mortar...